Certified Insane, page 22
“But if they’ve arrested Hartung . . .” Paul Burkhs ran his fingers nervously through his hair. “That looks as if they’re still on the wrong track.”
“Never mind. I want to go back.” Gisela put her hand over Budde’s mouth, stifling his protests. “Don’t listen to him! I want to go back—after all, it only happened because he was trying to rescue me. But I don’t want to go on—I can’t go on any more.”
They heard the sound of an engine outside the hut, and Ben Mullah looked at his watch. “Here already!” he said, pleased. “They must have driven like the wind.” He looked at Klaus Budde. “The stretcher will be here in a minute, and then you’ll be on your way back to civilization.”
Resigned, Klaus Budde shrugged his shoulders. “All right, I’m a cripple! Can’t do anything to defend myself.”
“Oh, someone should give him a good shaking!” Gisela’s voice trembled. “There’s no one who can help him here!”
“Except Allah,” said Dr Ben Mullah quietly.
“But at home we have good doctors and hospitals too!”
Dr Ben Mullah did not take offence, merely raised a hand in acknowledgement and smiled.
Half an hour later, Klaus Budde and Gisela Peltzner were on their way back from the oasis of Bir Zarrat.
Anna and Heinrich Fellgrub, Ewald Peltzner, Dr Fritz Vrobel the neurologist, his colleague Dr Markus Oldenberg, and Mr Adenkoven, formerly Peltzner’s solicitor, were arrested at 7.15 that morning and remanded in custody.
Four days later, an operation was performed on Klaus Budde in a German hospital specializing in spinal injuries. It lasted four hours. Gisela Peltzner and Gerd Hartung, whose appeal against a warrant of arrest had been allowed, sat outside the operating theatre in a small waiting room full of rubber plants and potted primulas. Whenever a nurse passed through the swing doors leading from the operating theatres, Gisela ran out into the corridor.
“How is he?” she cried.
Each time, she got the same brief answer. “The surgeon’s still operating.”
“It’s been four hours,” said Hartung, at last. He was standing at the window, looking out. Rain was falling from a grey, cheerless sky.
“If he’s crippled for life, it will be all my fault,” said Gisela. She had closed her eyes and clasped her hands in her lap.
“You mustn’t say that.” Gerd Hartung bit his lip. He was thinking of Monique, her dreadful death, and his own share of responsibility for it; he could find no excuse for that. “I’m far more to blame,” he said quietly.
“Gerd, you couldn’t have known.”
“I might have guessed. Monique did love me, and I loved her—God, how much unhappiness that damned money has brought us all.”
Soon after they began the fifth hour of their vigil, Budde was wheeled out of the operating theatre, lying on his stomach and still deeply unconscious. The trolley passed the waiting room silently on its tall rubber wheels. Hartung stopped Gisela from running out of the room.
“Not now,” he said. “He’s alive all right. We must ask the surgeon.”
“I want to be with him when he comes round.”
“Yes, so you shall be.” Dr Hartung looked at the big glass door. The surgeon appeared in the corridor, his face flushed but triumphant. Hartung breathed a sigh of relief. “I think we can look forward to the future,” he said quietly, putting an arm round Gisela’s shoulders. “The surgeon was smiling!”
Three months after the collapse of the whole edifice of lies Peltzner had built, three months after he had confessed, and Gisela Peltzner had been rehabilitated, three months after Anna and Heinrich Fellgrub had each been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, three months after the doctors who had abetted Peltzner, and whose trial was yet to come, had been struck off the list, three months after Klaus Budde’s first painful but successful attempts to walk, leaning on Gisela’s arm, a black car drove slowly through the electrically operated gates of Professor von Maggfeldt’s hospital once again.
Once again, two doctors were standing in the porch. They approached the car as it braked and came to a halt. Dr Pade opened the car door, while Dr Heintzke stayed in the background.
“Do get out,” said Dr Pade kindly. “The Professor is expecting you.”
A face appeared in the car doorway: a round, pale, wrinkled face. It was followed by a stout body. Two shaking hands reached out to Dr Pade, who took them and helped the man out of the car.
“I know you, don’t I?” said the man. His round face was distorted into a smiling mask, the eyes darting to and from in it. Then the great red cavern of his mouth dropped open, and he greeted Pade with a burst of mindless laughter.
“Yes, I’m Dr Pade,” said the senior consultant. “Come along.”
“The Professor’s expecting me?” Ewald Peltzner looked up at the white façade of the main building. “A lovely day,” he said. “Summer’s in the air. Has my daughter arrived?”
Dr Pade’s face did not move a muscle. “Not yet, Herr Peltzner.”
“Oh, well, she should be here soon. She’s on her way from St Tropez by air, you see. She rang yesterday to tell me. She’ll be so pleased to meet the Professor—delightful fellow! Monique likes distinguished company.”
Dr Pade took Ewald Peltzner’s arm, and they walked slowly into the big white building. Dr Heintzke, carrying the file recommending Peltzner’s admission, closed the door after them. The black car turned and went out through the big gates, back to the road. In the rear view mirror, the chauffeur saw the black bars come together.
“Shutting out the whole real world,” said the doctor who had accompanied Peltzner.
“Will he ever get out of there?” asked the chauffeur.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “I doubt it.” He said no more, but looked at the fresh green leaves on the trees.
Professor von Maggfeldt came forward to meet Peltzner. “Delighted to see you,” he said. “You’re welcome here.” There was no mockery in his tone, only genuine pity. Ewald Peltzner nodded.
“It’s good to find friends at last,” he said happily. Then, suddenly, he started crying like a child, and was given his first sedative injection.
He had become one more case in the psychiatric hospital.
Heinz G. Konsalik, Certified Insane
